Cinnabon
A cinnamon roll the size of a dinner plate, buried under cream cheese frosting that pooled in the box. You could smell the counter from the other end of the mall, which was not an accident. Nobody ever finished one alone and everybody ordered one anyway.
The first Cinnabon opened on December 4, 1985, at the SeaTac Mall in Federal Way, Washington, and it exists because two other deals fell through. Rich Komen, majority owner of the Seattle-based company Restaurants Unlimited, had watched T.J. Cinnamons succeed in Kansas City and tried to get franchising rights; that failed. He then pursued a partnership with Mrs. Powell's bakery in Idaho Falls; that failed too. Sitting on a lease he already held at SeaTac Mall, Komen and Restaurants Unlimited chief executive Ray Lindstrom decided to build their own bakery concept from scratch. The signature roll itself was the work of a named human being — Jerilyn Brusseau, a Seattle baker, created the recipe.
The roll was the product, but the smell was the marketing, and the company has been unusually candid about it. Cinnabon stores are designed with the oven built into the front of the shop rather than the back, and the company's president told the Wall Street Journal that a test location with the oven moved to the rear saw sales fall significantly. Rolls are baked every thirty minutes so the air stays perfumed, and franchises are instructed to buy the weakest hoods possible so the scent wafts back into the store instead of out of it. That reporting dates to 2014 rather than to the mall's heyday, so it describes a strategy the company acknowledges rather than a documented 1990s practice — but anyone who walked past one in 1996 can confirm it was working by then.
The chain moved through owners as it grew: AFC Enterprises bought it in 1998 for $65 million, moved the headquarters to the Atlanta area in 1999, and sold it to Focus Brands in 2004 for $30.3 million. By December 2017 there were more than 1,200 Cinnabon bakeries in 48 countries, and the brand now sits under GoTo Foods alongside Auntie Anne's — the mall's two great smells, finally under one roof. A Classic Roll runs somewhere around 880 calories today, a figure best appreciated after the fact.
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